2012 in review: The New Statesman on... the arts

From Michael Jackson to Martin Amis: the best NS writing on the arts.

Simon Cowell was once "a young man burning with desperation". Photograph: Getty Images

Welcome to the sixth instalment of the New Statesman's 12 days of Blog-mas. (Yesterday's round up, of our best interviews, is here).

This summer, the Cultural Olympiad showed off British art to the world, but as autumn arrived the cuts to art programmes made in the spring started to show. Here are some of our best reviews - click the headlines to open them in a new window:

"It’s as close to magic as you’ll get in Shepherd’s Bush". Sophie Emhirst reviews that rare thing: a shy band.

This gig is a lesson in how you put on a show if you don’t like prancing about on stage or chatting to your fans. You need three things: smoke, lights, a surprise object. The smoke comes first, pumped and billowing long before the trio come out on stage. It all makes sense once the lights go down and a spotlight, swirled with clouds, falls on Romy singing “Angels”. But the lights have their own show to do, building as the bass gets thicker. These aren’t spotlights, or disco swoopers, or strobes, or circling glitter balls. These are lights as walls: wave after wave sweeping over the audience and then twisting back to decapitate the band, their heads in pitch black, bodies illuminated. They keep coming too, these lights, so just when you think the ship has steadied, there they are in different forms – as a fan from ceiling to floor, vertical, a slatted gate of light slicing through the crowd and then as a thumping glare, flashes of full white in time with the beat, so you get moments of screaming brightness followed by black again.

The New Statesman’s friends and contributors choose their favourite books of 2012. Here's AS Byatt's:

Jenny Uglow’s The Pinecone (Faber & Faber, £20) is about the language of carving, objects containing ideas. It is the story of Sarah Losh, a north country heiress in the early 19th century, forceful, learned, independent, who built a church full of fascinating images. The tale is mysterious because Uglow worked with almost no manuscript remains and scrupulously invented nothing. She has turned this central silence into a kind of force by describing stones, glass, things constructed, so precisely that they become not exactly alive but strangely present on the page. Their world – business, weather, politics, poets, marriages, deaths – becomes a revenant around them. I don’t know another book that feels quite like this one.

Bower depicts a young man burning with desperation, reliant on his father for cash bailouts, a figure of industry-wide mockery. (He is perfectly described by a music producer in the 1980s as “not credible. He looked like he was in charge of Easter eggs.”) Eventually, he has a genuine hit (if that’s a fair description of Westlife) and it’s not long before the TV version of Cowell is launched and the money rolls in.

Henry James once defined criticism as the mind “reaching out for the reasons of its interest”, a process that he deemed “the very education of our imaginative life”. Michael Gorra doesn’t include this quotation in Portrait of a Novel but it is an apt description of the book he has written about James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Among other irritations, Ganesh has an alarming fondness for the ostentatious or redundant adverb: Britain has a “haughtily opaque state”; Norman Lamont was “elegantly caustic”; Archie Norman, the businessman and former Tory MP, is “sublimely able”; Andy Coulson, the disgraced former News of the World editor-turned-Tory spinner, is “sublimely able”; Alan Clark, the Conservative diarist and libertine, is “famously fleshly”; the civil servant Nicholas Macpherson is “languidly brilliant”; Boris Johnson is “chaotically charismatic”; the Institute for Fiscal Studies is “unimpeachably pukka”; City financiers on their way to work are the “impossibly multinational hordes scurrying from Bank or Moorgate . . . each morning”; Oliver Letwin is “almost uniquely unsuited to practical politics”. Can something be “almost” unique?

Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim has its origins in his intense and competitive friendship with Philip Larkin, writes Keith Gessen.

Both young men spent a good portion of their time at Oxford abusing the literature they were supposed to study. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Larkin wrote to Amis about Old English poetry. “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.” They invented a game called “horsepissing,” in which they’d replace words from classic literary texts with obscenities –“I have gathered up six slender basketfuls OF HORSEPISS,” for example – which they’d write in their own and each other’s copies of famous books. It was a game they never tired of or, indeed, outgrew.

Released 30 years ago, Michael Jackson’s album Thriller was the beginning of his assault on the white pop world. Here's Kate Mossman.

No one knew quite what to say when Jacko died in 2009 at the age of 50. Some said they “saw that coming”, which is also what they said about Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse. It seemed disingenuous – if anything, all three had been conveniently, temporarily forgotten like the mad woman in the attic. Perhaps the world is now ready to accept, all over again, that Jackson was the greatest pop star who ever lived. He broke the race barrier, redefined the pop video and forged a sound so pervasive that it can be heard in the songs of Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Nicky Minaj and a whole host of twenty somethings who were not even born during his glory years. Which brings us back to that kid in front of the TV. The record that achieved all these things was Thriller.

There have been surprisingly few filmmakers (and actors) willing to put the deity into tangible form on screen. Probably my favourite example is from television. In the “Batteries” episodes from The Sarah Silverman Program, Silverman has a one-night stand with God (Tucker Smallwood). To her chagrin, He’s still there in the morning—and He’s clingy. (Later she uses Him for her own ends when she wants to show up at her high-school reunion and trump her former classmates with her impressive new boyfriend. Perhaps the nicest touch is His little “GOD” nametag.)

"People just want to connect. If I put my heart in it and people connect that’s the most important thing." Alan White on Josh Osho.

There’s a part of yourself that’s omnipotent. That’s the creative moment – you start with something tangible, then you’re almost like a God for a moment, and then you step back, and you’re human again. At that point, you can analyse it and break it down. And quite often I read back something I wrote and don’t understand where it came from. There are all these layers you never saw. It’s like Amy Winehouse – she always starts with something tangible – little conversations, or moments, raises them to the level of art, and then in the ears of her listeners, it becomes something different again.

Art website ARTINFO has released a list of the “100 Most Iconic Artworks From the Last 5 Years”. Charlotte Simmonds digests it.

Feminist punk group/performance artists - and recent cause-célèbre - Pussy Riot’s most famous performance saw them perform on the alter at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow - then landed them in jail.